Every year at our Festival, I give church tours. I enjoy this because the visitors are always awed by the light and color in our church, and they are especially caught by the icons. It's fun to explain things to people who want to know. Our first stop is in the narthex in front of the icon of the Resurrection. I introduce myself and St. Sophia church, and then I explain to them the theology of icons and why we have them. Many people are familiar with the prohibition on graven images from the Old Testament, so it is a serious thing to have images in the church. It requires explanation. I give them three lesser reasons and one greater one. The three lesser ones are:
That people were illiterate and had to learn by pictures;
That Orthodox Christians love art in images, music, incense, etc;
For decoration and beauty.
Then, while I pass around a honey-scented beeswax candle for them to smell (or I used to before the pandemic), I refer them to Saint John of Damascus, who explained that we have icons because they point to Jesus Christ and the cornerstone of our faith: the Incarnation. We believe that the Son of God chose to depict himself in matter by taking on flesh and blood. Because of this, we are allowed and even compelled to use matter (wood and paint) to depict him, and this subcreative effort of ours reveals our faith in the Incarnation. Thus matter--the created world-is twice blessed, because God "saw that it was good" in the beginning. This rings true for visitors to our church because the Pacific Northwest is very beautiful and very much cherished by the local population, who love hiking, skiing, sailing, et cetera.
At this moment in the tour, I see people realizing that our discussion is not only going to be about details of art and architecture, but what they mean for us.
From here, using the candle as a pointer, I show and explain the elements of the Resurrection icon: the letters ICXC, Jesus in the mandorla, Adam's limp hand as Jesus raises him and Eve, the stylized coffins and lettering, the broken gates of hell, the kings of Israel, the apostles, the broken locks, the mountains of ascent, Jesus's unique halo with the O OV boldly stating his divinity- harkening back to when God spoke out of the burning bush- and the inverse perspective that makes the image focus not in the far recesses of the scene, but out in front: the icon is inviting you into communion with it, and in a way it is incomplete without the viewer.
Recently I was rereading Ouspensky's and Baggley's works about icons and was surprised to see how much I absorbed from them years ago without even noticing it. Because I give this tour several times a year, my pattern has become second nature. I can always see that my tour audience is interested and listening, so my reading of the Resurrection icon has changed very little over the years. I've tried doing a different icon, but the Resurrection works best.
So my pattern is the same every year, and I see this familiar icon and venerate it every Sunday. Yet, sometimes when I am giving a church tour and talking to the people, while I am anticipating their questions and watching for their reactions... I suddenly am faced with- Oh my goodness, this is all real. God took on flesh and lived and died as one of us and rose from the dead...
Presvytera Elizabeth Scott Tervo is a native of Boston and her publications include Eve in the Time Machine, a poetry collection (Basilian Media, 2023), and The Sun Does Not Shine Without You, a memoir, published in the republic of Georgia (Azri 2021). Her poetry and stories have appeared in Ruminate and the New Haven Review among others, and won a prize at Inscape. She is the coordinator of the Doxacon Seattle Writers Group for speculative literature and Christianity.
